Rockmoon, a developer out of Singapore, has created a tech demo that lets two players control a game — one using Kinect, the other using an iPhone.

Check out the video of the game in action below. The two players team up to pilot a vehicle flying through a trench. The Kinect player moves, leans and twists in order to steer the vehicle; the iPhone player uses virtual buttons on the touchscreen to control and fire the vehicle’s gatling guns.

Here’s hoping Rockmoon, or somebody, really does start combining all the amazing technology that’s out there right now to create some of this stuff. Because I would like to buy it.

Gotta hand it to those Gameloft guys. They’re leaving no alternative, non-traditional video gaming platform unmolested by the N.O.V.A. series. The games are available on the iPhone and iPad and on devices that run Google’s Android operating system, and soon it’ll be available on Panasonic Internet TVs, too.

That’s right, N.O.V.A. Elite is a free-to-play Facebook-based first-person shooter, for those of you who felt FarmVille was not quite hardcore enough for you. It’s multiplayer-only and lets you customize the hell out of your character, a supersuit-wearing space marine who is an acorn that fell not too far from the tree of Halo inspiration.

Having played a few rounds on N.O.V.A. Elite, I was left…well, I wasn’t exactly pounding away at the “Like” button. It’s a touch laggy (because it’s on Facebook, I imagine), it’s not very clear exactly what kills you when you die or how the gunplay works as far as damage, it keeps crashing my browser and it only has one map open at the outset. In order to keep playing more than one round at a time, it appears as though you have to pony up the fake Facebook dough to purchase new maps.

If you’re willing to go in for that kind of thing, there seems to be a lot of weapons and customization available if you just earn or pay for it. Check out the trailer below for a bit more information.

Not on that list is the U.S., but despite not arriving in our market until “spring” sometime, Gameloft is already reporting that the Play is one of the top Android devices on which people are playing its games.

Gameloft entered into a deal with Sony before the Play’s launch to supply it with games, including a few that come preloaded on the machine, and since then, Gameloft has been releasing titles for Google’s Android operating system that start out as exclusives on the Play. After about a month, they get opened up to the general Android-owning population.

Even in 11 countries for a little more than a week and despite not having launched in the U.S. yet, Gameloft is seeing really strong sales on the Play, it seems. It also seems to suggest that the Play has been selling pretty well, even though supplies are limited because of the recent natural disasters in Japan.

OpenFeint, an online gaming network that supplies things like Achievements, friends lists and leaderboards, is working to bring more titles to Google’s mobile operating system, which includes phones like Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play. The service has already added 215 new Android games to its service in the last six months, and it’s poised to get a whole lot more.

Android can sometimes have trouble drawing game developers away from making their games for Apple’s iOS platform, but that’s been changing recently as Google rolls out improvements to the Android ecosystem, like in-app purchasing.

And OpenFeint has been doing its part, too, attempting to build up the Android games market by encouraging iOS developers to port their games to Google’s operating system. In a partnership with The9, OpenFeint created a $100 million fund to help in bringing more games to the platform.

It’s a little too early to tell if the fund is working, but OpenFeint’s got 215 games that show it must be doing something right.

I just got out of Apple’s iPad 2 announcement event, where I got to sample the new device a bit playing a couple of the bigger games on the iOS: Gameloft’s Halo-like FPS, N.O.V.A. 2, and ChAIR’s Unreal Engine 3 game, Infinity Blade.

The big upgrades to the iPad 2 are its new A5 dual-core processor chip and the addition of the a gyroscope and accelerometer to the hardware. The latter two bring the iPad in line with the capabilities of the latest generation of iPhones, and it works great for N.O.V.A. 2, which uses the accelerometer and gyroscope to great success as part of its aiming scheme.

Playing N.O.V.A. 2 on the iPad 2 was more or less just like playing it on the iPhone, only now it’s bigger and thus, relatively prettier. It handles in all the same ways as the iPhone version, which is great because Gameloft has got some quality controls built into its game, but the larger screen make seeing the action and responding to it a lot easier. I only got to sample it for a few seconds, but my preliminary experience with N.O.V.A. 2 is that it plays better on the iPad 2 than on the iPhone 4, just as a function of size and presentation.

As for Infinity Blade, the game is definitely pretty and the A5 means the graphical fidelity and framerate run pretty high. Going nuts and slashing away at the first enemy I came across had no effect on how well the game handled, which was really nice. It’s tough to draw a direct comparison against previous play of Infinity Blade on the iPad — of which I have very little experience — but the game did seem to work better now than it has in the past, thanks to Apple’s amped-up technology.

As far as gaming is concerned, if you’re not into the iPad already, you probably aren’t jumping in your car to line up on March 11. But the addition of that accelerometer and gyroscope, as well as the increased graphical speed, could mean some great new games are in the iPad’s future. The device now has all the best features of the iPhone: the accelerometer, rear-facing camera and gyroscope mean that augmented reality games that are interesting on the iPhone are now possible on the iPad, but more than that, the technology is going to encourage a lot of innovation that we haven’t seen yet.

Gameloft and Epic Games announced a deal in which Gameloft will use Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 to create four upcomign games across multiple platforms, including mobile devices, Playstation 3 and connected TVs.

Here’s a quote from the press release:

‘Gameloft is very pleased to partner with Epic, especially with their ability to stay ahead of the curve and continually place the best game engine technology in developers’ hands at any given point in time,’ said Julien Fournials, vice president of production, Gameloft. ‘Using Unreal Engine 3 allows us to push game visuals with remarkable lighting and high-fidelity environments. We are confident that players will enjoy the games powered by Unreal Engine 3.’

Yup, both companies are very happy to work with each other and talk about how great they both are.

Meanwhile, neither spilled any info on what the games might be, when we can expect them or any other useful details. Gameloft might not be the only developer to go with Unreal Engine 3, though — Epic recently raised the royalty cap on the engine to $50,000 from $5,000, which should make it a whole lot cheaper for developers to use the software.

Previously, when a developer made a game with Unreal Engine 3, it was free until the game made $5,000 in sales, at which time the developer had to pay royalties to Epic for the use of the engine. With the cap bumped to 10 times that, a lot more small developers — specifically mobile ones who might want to make awesome things like ChAIR’s Infinity Blade — can use the engine and make sure they have made a little money before Epic takes its cut.

While mobile games can be great fun and even push blur the barrier between the capabilities of portables and smartphones, there’s one facet that’s usually painfully lacking: a physical, tactile and responsive control pad.

If that’s a concern for you and you’re willing to part with $75, though, you can order the iControlPad, a Bluetooth peripheral that snaps gamepad controls to your smartphone. It looks a whole lot like the signature slide-down gamepad that comes on Sony Ericsson’s newly announced Xperia Play.

Don’t go running for your credit card numbers just yet, though, iPhone gamers. While the control pad is compatible with Apple’s iDevices, as well as the Blackberry Touch, HTC Dream and T-Mobile G1 (among a handful of others), it might not be compatible with your games.

The iControlPad website mentions that the company behind the peripheral is working to get game developers to support the device. You’ll want to do some research before you shell out for this thing, as $74.99 is kind of steep for a device that might not work with your games. But if it does work, iControlPad could finally make all those Sega ports like Virtua Fighter II worth purchasing (because their on-screen controls are totally irritating).

It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and if you didn’t equate that with App Store game sales…well, I don’t blame you. But I’m here to correct that oversight.

Both EA Mobile and Gameloft have marked a substantial number of their top-tier games down to $0.99 for a limited time. Most of the games are pretty solid, especially for this price tag, although you won’t find newbies like Sacred Odyssey: Rise of Ayden or Dead Space on these lists. Also unfortunately absent is N.O.V.A. 2.

Still, check out the offerings below. If I can make some suggestions: from Gameloft, Spider-Man: Total Mayhem is kind of amazing as far as phone games are concerned, and the Uncharted knock-off Shadow Guardians just jumped onto my download queue. From EA, The Simpsons Arcade is a game you might remember from mid-1990′s movie theaters and there’s the full-featured Madden NFL 11, as well as mainstays like Tetris and Scrabble. Avoid Mass Effect Galaxy, however, unless you absolutely must have a boring, short tie-in game with a very small amount of Jacob/Miranda back story for Mass Effect 2.

Just a week after being pulled by Google from its Android Market for breaking the developer agreement, Kongregate’s game-distributing Android app is back, after going through some changes.

The app, called Kongregate Arcade, makes more than 300 of the Flash games available on Kongregate.com available to Android-running smartphone owners. The app was in the Android Market a week ago, but Google pulled it the day it was released because its developer agreement forbids apps from distributing other apps, which it claimed Kongregate Arcade was doing.

Kongregate has tweaked the app some, using the Android browser cache to save game files rather than downloading them to a separate location, and running its Flash games full-screen in a Webkit browser while ditching the address bar from the top, thereby limiting what users can do with it. The idea is to make Kongregate more browser-like, allowing it to run Flash games like Android would other websites, and without downloading files that might constitute “distributing apps.”

There’s a trailer for the newly fixed app from Kongregate below, and Android users can find the new version of Kongregate Arcade in the Android Marketplace now — though for how long is impossible to say. Kongregate hopes the changes will meet Google’s requirements, but if not, you can still download the original Kongregate Arcade straight from kongregate.com.

It’s not gone forever, though — you can still download Kongregate Arcade from Kongregate itself (hooray for open source!) and bypass Google altogether.

According to Google, the issue with Kongregate Arcade being in the Market was that it was a violation of Google’s Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement. That agreement’s legalese dictates that apps in the Market aren’t allowed to distribute other apps, although if Kongregate or other developers want to package their Flash games as individual apps, that’s just fine.

Meantime, Kongregate is working with Google to iron out the problems and return Kongregate Arcade to the Market. That’ll likely mean it’ll be reduced in its functionality, at least in some ways. At the very least, though, the app should still help with game app discovery, which is something of a problem on the Android system.

Unlike the iPhone and iPad, Android is a bit lacking in users’ ability to track down quality games. Kongregate’s new service hopes to make the discovery part of the process a little easier, in addition to converting a ton of its site’s simple Flash games to a format that works on Android 2.2 Froyo.

Some of the games will be downloaded with the app and available for offline play, but for the most part, it sounds like you’ll need an Internet connection of some kind to play Kongregate Arcade. On the plus side, you can integrate your existing Kongregate account to keep track of all scores and any badges you earn when playing — so if you’ve got Kongregate friends, you can spend some time squashing their scores whenever you’ve got a free moment.

One more cool thing: this should single Kongregate’s start with making Android-specific games rather than just converting its existing Flash games to touchscreen capability. Sounds awesome.

Verizon announced that it will carry the iPhone, and there was much rejoicing — for about 10 seconds, until everyone realized that the CDMA chip inside the new phone means you can’t use voice and data at the same time.

Even still, Verizon getting the iPhone is kind of a big deal. There are 93 million people on the Verizon network, and while they won’t all be getting iPhones, a whole lot people who formerly didn’t want to because of AT&T probably will be. And many of them are going to have access to the iTunes App Store’s massive complement of mobile games.

I know, I know: iPhone games, man. Lots of us in the gaming community don’t believe in them — another casual gaming gimmick in an industry desperately trying to appeal to grandparents and young girls. Guess what, though: Apple and iPhone game makers are literally pulling down billions in revenue from mobile games, and that doesn’t even take into account phones running on Google’s Android OS. Today you can do on a phone what you had to have a high-end PC to do just 15 years ago — you can play games. Against other people.

Lots of mobile games already have leaderboard and achievement support, in the form of Apple’s Game Center and services such as Open Feint. They let you make friends, connect to other players, and see how you measure up. But then there are truly multiplayer online games — N.O.V.A. 2 includes first-person shooter deathmatches to go along with its full-fledged FPS single-player campaign. All you need is a Wi-Fi connection and you’re actually gaming against other people, but on a phone.

At CES 2011 last week, we saw another huge leap forward: Electronic Arts is bringing a Rock Band game to Verizon’s 4G LTE network that further increases the power of mobile multiplayer, and ditches the need for Wi-Fi. You’re not going to have to find a Starbucks or a McDonald’s in order to tap away at rhythm games or race opponents (like in Real Racer 2′s 16-player iPhone tracks) — you can do it anywhere, like on a car trip or in line at the bank or from any number of places where playing video games with other people was previously impossible.

The big innovations aren’t coming from consoles or even PCs. They’re coming from phones.

Let me say that again: the LG Optimus 2X can play games. Those games can be played against consoles and PCs.

Meaning that 12-year-old French kid who frags you next year in Call of Duty 9 might be playing from a phone on a boat in the middle of a lake. And he’ll still kick your ass.

Time to sit up and take notice, I’d say. We’re talking about gaming quickly becoming possible on just about any device, with the kind of strength that used to be reserved for dedicated machines. We’re talking about gaming in your back pocket wherever you go.

And not just shrunk-down console and PC games, either. The small size and dedicated technology found in phones — touchscreens, for example — are actually making for gaming experiences you can’t get anywhere else, and they’re pushing the envelope. App developer Somethin’ Else recently released Papa Sangre, a video game almost completely devoid of graphics. It’s played entirely with sound, in headphones, with the touchscreen controls meant to help you orient yourself in relationship to what you hear and either approach or move away from it. It’s creepy and trippy, to say the least. It’s also a great f—ing idea.

For my money and in my experience, the real innovation in gaming right now isn’t coming from having a new motion control rig on every console that fine-tunes the art of virtual bowling. It’s coming from games that are melding touch, tilt, augmented reality and online service, and making it available on small-scale, indie-produced games.

If you’re still not sold on mobile games, you obviously haven’t played them. Sure, there are those that are slight and shallow, but that’s certainly not the whole story. The sooner gamers figure that out and start embracing what’s coming, the sooner the industry will start supporting even more great, platform-crossing user experiences in the realm of things we previously thought impossible.

You might be interested to see what Gameloft sent me: it’s an 8-inch tall limited edition Kal Wardin figure from N.O.V.A. 2, which I won more or less for hitting the retweet button on Gameloft’s Twitter feed about a month back.

See — that Twitter thing. It’s cool.

Anyway, I got lucky, which was nice, and the figure finally arrived, which is also nice. Having pulled it out and played with it (uh… I like toys), I can vouch for its coolness. I also took some photos, including one of good ol’ Kal standing like the Jolly (Blue) Giant next to a can of beans for scale. It’s amazing how little visually identifiable food I have my apartment — not even a Coke can.

It’s kind of interesting that this guy even exists. N.O.V.A. 2 is a pretty big game, but it’s not Angry Birds, and it’s also an iPhone and iPad game. Granted, Gameloft is making a lot of games on a lot of different platforms and is even bringing its games straight to Panasonic’s connected TVs, but I guess I didn’t realize the kind of effort and money that had been sunk into N.O.V.A. 2.

You’re probably getting sick of hearing me talk about iPhone games (and if you’re not — just wait), but this seems like a pretty big deal to me. Companies have been sinking a lot of money into gaming in the last few years — look at the Activision’s insane party at Comic Con 2010, for example. And yeah, I’ve heard of Angry Birds merchandise, but that’s a bit of a special case; or at least I thought.

Seems to me that all signs are pointing at companies working on small-scale games becoming bigger players in the gaming industry. Maybe I’m reading too much into this Kal Wardin figure on my shelf, but this is the kind of thing large companies like Sega produce for collectors (who are mostly in Japan). I feel like this one, from an iOS game franchise, is a big deal, and an indication of the shape of things to come.

N.O.V.A. 2 maker Gameloft is known for taking well-known, successful console game franchises and … let’s say, using them to inspire mobile games for Apple’s iPhone and the Google Android operating system.

The company has just released a new video and Facebook page teasing its new game, and there’s a lot of speculation of just what it’ll be — and what it’s borrowing from.

We’ve got the new teaser video below, which has a lot of action-RPG-type elements. Gameloft isn’t exactly subtle when it comes to the games they’re making and the console and PC games that preceded them: the N.O.V.A. series is largely regarded as iPhone Halo, Shadow Guardian is basically Uncharted, Dungeon Hunter and its sequel ape Diablo. Gameloft knows what it’s doing, and you can tell the trailer is made specifically to make us ask, “What game is this supposed to be like?”

There are a couple of clues. From the VERY short shot of the user interface, the game looks like an action game, as evidenced by the “sword” and “shield” buttons. Take a look:

Horseback riding seems to factor in significantly as well — you can see a little horse icon in the bottom right, and several shots in the video show the horse. Then there’s dungeon crawling, as we see above and in the minimap, and tree spirits. All point heavily toward something like a Gameloft take on The Legend of Zelda. That icon at the top right of the screen might be for accessing an item select menu, allowing you to switch to things like a boomerang. I’m speculating, of course, but that’s where my money would go.

Although, that airship in the beginning is troubling. It suggests a Final Fantasy imitation — although, Gameloft’s Eternal Legacy sort of fills that role already.

In order to get the word out, Gameloft is conducing a little bit of Facebook marketing. By sharing a link to the reveal video and “Liking” the Gameloft page, you can actually help speed up the reveal of the game. It’s a bit gimmicky, but maybe if enough people give into that infernal Facebook, we’ll at least get some new information.

After years of speculation and waiting. Verizon and Apple announced the end of the iPhone 4′s exclusivity with AT&T. Finally, Verizon customers will be able to get Apple’s crazily popular smartphone starting February 10.

There are 93 million Verizon customers out there, and up until now, they haven’t been able to get hold of an iPhone. The fact that the phone has been handled by AT&T exclusively has also held a lot of people back from purchasing one. Verizon’s new announcement is a massive one, then — millions more people could soon be talking on iDevices, and Verizon’s network will have to handle them all.

At its keynote address Tuesday, Verizon made sure to reassure everyone that it had been testing the new iPhone 4, which uses CDMA technology to be compatible with Verizon’s network, for about a year to make sure it would work well. The company has also been building in a margin of network space to accommodate all the potential new iPhone sales.

Prices are comparable to AT&T’s existing iPhones: $199 for the 16GB iPhone 4, $299 for the 32GB, both with a two-year contract. In a really cool twist, however, Verizon’s iPhones will work as mobile hotspots for up to five devices. Information is still sketchy as to what everything will cost, or if Verizon will provide an unlimited data plan like some media outlets have speculated.